


Same Changes

by forgottendialect



Category: Best Friends Forever (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-18
Updated: 2012-10-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 22:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgottendialect/pseuds/forgottendialect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was going to be her year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Changes

Being back in the old apartment with Lennon, in the city that was their home for so many years, everything felt like a constant state of backslide. Jess was living the life that used to be hers, but it was different now, just a little off-kilter. She'd left New York full of confidence and happiness, about to get married, the peak of her life beckoning brightly. Now she was back, that peak a speck in the distance, to find that the city had kept moving without her. There were apartment blocks where parks used to be, and none of the restaurants had the same names. Lennon had grown up, and was in this incredible, loving, adult relationship. Even Quinetta was nine-and-a-goddamn-half.

  
And then there was Rav, who she hadn't wanted to talk to in three years, less because what he did was wrong and more because she couldn't let herself admit that he was right. Stupid Rav, with his loyalty and his gruffness and his stupid hairy face that she kind of wanted to put her face on, sometimes. Only when he was standing in a good patch of light or she'd had a lot of white wine or he was smiling at her just right. And maybe she'd been thinking that a lot more frequently after the weird accidental make-out in the elevator at the hotel in Altantic City, but that didn't mean anything. Just an occupational hazard of having male friends. Sometimes stuff got weird, and it didn't mean anything unless you let it.  
  
(They talked about it exactly once, a week after Rav got back from Brazil (alone: not that that made Jess happy, or anything). Rav said: “Jess, I think we should go out. On a date.”, and Jess said: “What? No! Huh?” and left the room.)  
  
Most of the time Jess forgot that it had even happened. But then, sometimes, Rav would put his hands on her waist, or brush against her in public, and she would suddenly remember the warmth of his body and the way he felt pressed up against her in that elevator and something in her brain would say oh, right.  
  
Jess refused to think about anything that happened that night beyond the kiss. They were really old friends and they cared about each other and it was a weird misstep that was bound to happen at some point. Besides, having feelings for Rav, real feelings, would be a huge step backwards in the new life she was going to have where things were different, better, than the way they'd always been. They'd been through this already, a period of six months or so in college where Jess had developed the world's biggest crush on Rav, a gross, pining, hair-twirling infatuation that culminated in her getting so drunk at a party they were at that when she tried to make a pass at him she'd fallen over and knocked herself out on the Cobain-esque steel-capped boots he wore because he thought made him look cool.  
  
Some combination of the humiliation of the whole incident and the sweet but totally platonic way Rav picked her up and held sticky party ice to the bump on her head afterwards reset something in Jess's brain, and she'd never had those kinds of feelings for him since. There was no way she was going to start heading back there now.  
  
She'd been trying to get her life together and be an adult. She didn't ignore her mail until the pile threatened to tip over and kill someone. She'd gotten better at respecting Joe and Len's privacy. She'd even started actually looking at her bank account again instead of just shoving her credit card at people and hoping it wasn't rejected. She was going to get her shit together, and it was going to be awesome. This was going to be her year.

-

  
She decided to make this declaration official one afternoon when she turned up for a group lunch only fourteen minutes late, joining the others at a table in the diner near the apartment.  
  
“You guys, I've decided that this is going to be the year of Jess!”  
  
She dropped her body into the diner seat next to Rav. The resulting jolt of the bench seat dislodged the fries that were on the end of his fork, and Jess took the opportunity to grab them off the table and shove them in her mouth. Rav turned and glared at her. She grinned back, fries sticking out between her teeth.  
  
Lennon's amused but indulgent voice drew her attention back to the front.  
  
“Well, that's nice. I'm happy for you.”  
  
Jess swallowed and grinned some more.  
  
“Thank you!”  
  
“Uh, Jess”, this from Joe, who was giving her that vaguely condescending look he used when he thought she was being an idiot, “you do know that so far this year in the 'year of Jess', you've gotten served with divorce papers, moved in to your best friend's boyfriend's office, set fire to the apartment, been inexplicably half-naked in front of my parents, been a competitor in some college kids' cougar ball-”  
  
“Oh, screw you, Joe... seppi.”  
  
“Not my name.”  
  
“The 'year' is a figure of speech! The year is starting now. Yeah, my year doesn't follow the regular year... schedule. So take that. It's my year. I get to decide when it starts. And I say it starts now.”  
  
Laughing, Joe held his hands up in defeat while Lennon reached across the table to pat her hand.  
  
“Okay, Jess, calm down. Let's get you some food, okay?”  
  
Jess continued to glare at Joe until a burger appeared in front of her to claim her attention.

-

  
And yeah, maybe she could admit that the main reason behind this surge of self-confidence was that her chef nights at Rav's bar were going really well. They were getting attention in the local papers and gaining such a decent crowd that Rav had to agree to let her host them every week instead of once a month, on the condition that she follow a very extensive list of very specific rules and regulations. Some she let him have – no tablecloths, no fancy candles, no decorating the dead animals on the walls with garlands and the like – which was fine because the upkeep on those was proving more expensive than they'd counted on, and the combination of the bar's rough but cared-for interior and her gourmet but homestyle cooking actually worked really well. She wasn't going to admit that to Rav, though. Better to make him feel like he'd won a round, especially when they both knew that she was going to ignore most of the other rules.  
  
In addition, after they'd raised the prices a little on all the food, while keeping the booze cheap for the regulars, and the bar had started raking in enough money that Rav stopped complaining and started giving Jess and Len free wine while they were setting up instead.  
  
She did set one of the Filipes on fire one night, but he only ended up a little bit charred and didn't seem to be angry at her afterward, so she didn't count that as a total disaster. (He did, however, keep saying something about the floor and desert and she didn't understand how that had anything to do with the situation. She was really beginning to regret sleeping through Spanish 101.)  
  
The next night when she arrived to set up, Jess found Rav sitting in front of the bar with the newspaper spread out in front of him. She paused, a few feet away, looked from the newspaper to him and back again before approaching.  
  
“What... is this? What's going on here?”  
  
Rav looked up at her.  
  
“What? I'm reading the newspaper.”  
  
Jess started cackling. Rav scrunched his face at her with that angry bear look he sometimes got.  
  
“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but. Come on.”  
  
“Come on what, Jessica?”  
  
“No, it's just, you know. You're not exactly the newspaper-reading type.”  
  
“Oh, great, thank you, miss 'I need a dictionary to correctly spell the word pear'.”  
Rav chucked his bar towel on the counter and huffed off to the kitchen.  
  
“A pair of socks and a pear that you eat are the same sound, Rav! That's not on me, you can take that up with the English language!”  
  
Smiling, she took over his seat (and the peanuts he was eating) and looked down at the paper. It was open to the employment and education section, on a page half-filled with ads for chefs and cooking positions. She glanced up at the door Rav had vanished through, then back down at the page. It was strategically folded and half-covered with a glass and an empty bowl so that one ad in particular stood out. It was for cooking classes at a community college in the city, twice a week for a semester, starting the next month.  
  
“Learn speed and efficiency in the kitchen!” It proposed. “Get the skills you need to be a professional chef!”  
  
When Rav came back out of the kitchen, she didn't look up from studying the ad. Rav, who somehow always knew when to be quiet, unlike Jess with her chronic and likely one day fatal case of verbal diarrhoea, started polishing glasses nearby.  
  
She ripped the ad out of the paper and shoved it in her pocket, employing a fake coughing fit to very stealthily cover the noise, and definitely didn't care that she could see the corners of Rav's mouth pull into a smile out of the corner of her eye.

-

  
“Jessica, what is this?”  
  
Jess, halfway through getting dressed, stuck her torso out of her bedroom doorway with one arm inside her shirt.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
Lennon, who had been in the middle of putting on a load of laundry, which always involved removing random items from Jessica's pockets, held up the piece of paper and lifted an eyebrow in her direction.  
  
“Cooking lessons? This is amazing! I can't believe you didn't tell me! When do you start?”  
  
Jess finished putting her shirt on before answering.  
  
“It was just an idea. I don't think I'm gonna do it.”  
  
Lennon blinked in surprise, which gave Jess the chance to escape back into her room. (Which, when Joe wasn't there yes, was her room.)  
Dumping the laundry in the machine, Len followed a few seconds later.  
  
“I don't understand. Those classes would be so great! You really like cooking at Rav's, and you've been talking about how you need to figure out some sort of career path so you're not just sitting at home all the time.”  
  
“Yeah, but I don't know. It's...” another backslide. “It's school. I did my time there already. I know I wasted it on a liberal arts degree, but, you know.”  
  
“But these classes are only a couple of days a week! That's nothing, you could do that.”  
  
Jess sighed.  
  
“Yeah, but, then what? I have some crappy certificate, same as a few hundred pimply teenagers, and no real experience or practical skills. I don't want to do that, Len. I don't want to be the bottom of the food chain, I'm too old.”  
  
“Oh my god, stop being so dramatic. You are a great cook! You know that. You've got years of one-upping the food network under your belt, you're doing really well at the bar, and if you do the course maybe you'd be better at cooking under pressure and making things quickly as well as deliciously, right?”  
  
Jess shrugged half-heartedly, but she was listening. Len shot her a small smile.  
  
“Jess, it's just...” She looked down, fiddling with the edges of the paper in her hands. “I feel like you spend so much of your life planning and thinking about the future and having all these great ideas about what your life is going to be like that you kind of... miss out on the reality. And we're not twenty-one anymore. The reality is all we've really got.” She paused, and looked back up to meet Jess's eye. “You just live so far outside of yourself sometimes, I worry that you're going to miss the life you actually have now.”

-

  
Later that afternoon, when Len had left for the studio and Jess was left alone with her thoughts, she admitted to herself that Lennon was probably right. It's not like a brand new, fully-formed career was just going to appear to her at this point in her life. She couldn't just sit around forever hoping that something amazing would fall straight into her lap.  
  
If pressed, Jess would say that it was Lennon who gave her the push she needed to pick up the phone to inquire about the classes. Which was entirely true. But for some reason, when she made the call, voice a dozen times calmer and steadier than she felt, it was with Rav's voice in her head, saying, “you could do this, you know”.

-

  
On the first day of classes, Jess was more nervous than she could remember being since grade school. She stuttered her way through introductions, laughed nervously at inappropriate moments, fumbled recipes she could have done in her sleep. The teacher was intimidating and spoke in odd bursts of volume, speaking to an empty point toward the back of the room and then rounding, with terrifying accuracy, on a student, and shouting “YOU! What method would you suggest for such a situation?”, holding eye contact as they grasped for words. Jess crawled home at the end of the night, shut herself in her room, pulled all of her blankets up over her head, and refused to emerge even to let Joe get his computer.  
  
The second class was only marginally less humiliating.  
  
By the third or fourth week, though, she was starting to get her footing, like her body was remembering that she'd been walking all her life and that just because somebody was watching her didn't mean she couldn't still do it.  
  
In the sixth week, the teacher called her up in front of the class to demonstrate how to properly mix and fold crepe batter to achieve the perfect balance of smooth and sturdy, but delicate. Some of the students were glaring at her from behind their stations, but some were watching with actual interest, and the teacher, an actual chef who had worked in actual restaurants, was telling her that she had a natural gift with her wrists.  
  
It might have been a gross, pervy comment, but she chose to believe he was innocently commenting on her talent. When she sat back down she noticed that hers did look better than anyone else's in the room.  
  
(She made crepes for Len and Joe that night and beamed proudly while they ate their second, third, fourth helpings.)

-

  
The divorce was officially finalised on a Tuesday. Jess allowed herself half an hour to cry. Then she called Lennon to tell her to get off work early because they were going out to celebrate.  
  
She spent the rest of the afternoon actually cleaning the apartment, not just pushing her mess out of sight, going through her closet and getting rid of any and all clothing that said 'I am a desperate, sad and lonely person' (of which there was an embarrassing amount), and then went to the mall and bought a new black dress that was cut dangerously low in the front and made a dent in her bank account bigger than the last bill from her lawyer. When she left the apartment to meet Len and Joe at Rav's, Quinetta, who was loitering on the front steps as always, raised her eyebrows and tilted her head in approval. Jess beamed for a block and a half before realising that being so thrilled by the approval of a nine year old was probably ridiculous, even for her.  
(But when she got to the bar and Rav saw her, his jaw kind of dropped open for a second before he clenched it shut, and his voice was really low and gravelly when he said she looked nice. So yeah, she guessed the dress was pretty amazing.)  
  
That night, Rav evidently decided to ignore all of the unsaid rules they'd been abiding by since they'd kissed and Jess had shot him down (twice); flirting and touching and being distractingly charming, as if acting like they were a couple would make her get over the reasons why she didn't want them to be a couple.  
  
Actually, it was a pretty solid plan.  
  
The bar was busy and there were plenty of people there that they knew, other people he could be talking to, but all night Rav was never far from her side. Filling up her drink when she ran out, talking her up to other people, making her laugh by murmuring jokes in her ear.  
By the end of the night when Rav had emptied the bar and closed up, Jess was pleasantly drunk. Rav sat down next to her in a booth, close enough that their thighs brushed under the table. The lights were low and air hushed in that quiet, post-midnight way. Lennon and Joe had conveniently disappeared.  
  
“So, how are the classes going?”  
  
Jess rolled her head drunkenly towards him.  
  
“They're... going?”  
  
Rav raised his eyebrows at her. Continue.  
  
Jess sighed, smiled despite herself.  
  
“I don't know. They're good, I think. I mean, the teacher does this thing where he yells at the class while we're doing the timed assignments, to try and make us perform better under stress, but then afterwards he's really nice and friendly and stuff. Which I think is supposed to be comforting, but it just really freaks me out. I think he might be a psycho killer.”  
  
Rav snorted. “Okay. Aside from that, though.”  
  
“It's... yeah. It's good. I think I really like it. I feel like I'm getting, like, more competent, or whatever. I don't know, it's stupid, but I think it could be good.”  
  
Rav's face went from light to dark, intense as he leaned closer to her. “It's not stupid, Jess. You're smart and you're really talented. You're gonna kick ass at those classes if you just stick with it.”  
  
He was using that tone of voice he only used with her: exasperation layered with affection, underscored with a note of real, honest adoration. That voice that meant that he was being serious, that made her feel like her problems were the only thing that mattered to him in the world, that had been talking her off emotional ledges and corralling her from anxiety to happiness for nearly half their lives. She tried to ignore the way her heart was dancing in her chest.  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, I am gonna kick ass at this. They won't know what hit 'em.”  
  
Rav smiled at her, and she smiled back, couldn't not. Then Jess leaned into him, the world tilting and her wine-soaked brain unable to focus on anything but how close he was, how warm, how dear to her. In the back of her mind, something reminded her that she'd decided she wasn't going to do this again, but then he bent down towards her and they were kissing.  
  
His mouth was exactly as hard and desperate against hers as she remembered, and his beard still brushed exactly the same amount of friction against her skin, and when he pressed closer and wrapped an arm around her waist she couldn't think of a single reason why they'd ever spent any amount of time not kissing.

-

  
Jess couldn't have said how long they spent there in that booth; long enough for her to wind up mostly in Rav's lap, his arms low around her back; long enough for Lennon and Joe to decide to come and check on them.  
  
“Oh my god!”  
  
“Shh, Joe!”  
  
Jess and Rav sprang away from each other. For a moment, nobody moved; Joe and Lennon in the kitchen doorway, Rav with his hands hovering an inch away from Jess's sides, Jess perched above Rav's knees, looking like a rabbit frozen in the headlights.  
  
Predictably, Jess freaked first.  
  
“Oh, my god. Crap. Crap!”  
  
She backed out of the booth so fast she nearly tripped over her own feet, crashing out the front door and letting it swing shut behind her.  
  
The bar's remaining occupants all stood for a split second, stunned, and then started after her. Len and Joe on his heels, Rav spun around and held up both hands.  
  
“Nonono. Stay. Stay.”  
  
He took the door at a jog, spotting Jess halfway down the street, shuffling away as quickly as she could in six-inch heels.  
“Jess!”  
  
She looked back, spotted him, and tried to increase her speed, which only lead to her teetering and nearly colliding with a trash can.  
  
“Come on, stop. Talk to me.”  
  
Only half a block ahead now, she yelled back. “I don't want to talk!”  
  
“Jessica!” Finally catching up with her, Rav caught her by the arm and tugged softly until she stopped walking. Jess turned reluctantly to face him. Rav didn't let go of her arm.  
  
“Can we please just have a conversation about this, like normal people?”  
  
“We're not normal people.”  
  
Rav's hands and mouth twitched, like he couldn't decide between being angry or amused.  
  
“Like us, then. We've been friends for like, forever. Why can't we just stop being weird and talk about this?  
  
“Because, we're friends, Rav! Good friends, great friends, friends who don't have weird psychotic breaks and think they have feelings for each other! This is just some dumb thing we're going through that doesn't mean anything. We're gonna laugh about this in another three years!”  
  
Breathing heavily, eyes dark, Rav stepped forward and grabbed her hands in his.  
“I'm not joking! This isn't some phase. This isn't some temporary 'thing', like one day I just looked at you and decided, 'hey, maybe I want to be more than friends'! I've been thinking it for years. I was just stupid about it, and scared, and then you were with Peter, and then I was so angry at you, at myself, for screwing it all up so badly. I can't screw it up again, Jess. I want to this. I want you.”  
  
Jess's breaths sounded shallow and quick in the silence that followed, like they did when she was going to cry. When she finally spoke, her voice was as choked as he knew it would be.  
  
“I don't think I can do this.”

-

  
They didn't speak for twelve days.  
  
At home, Lennon tiptoed around the issue, trying to find ways to bring Rav's name into the conversation. Jess shut her down with a glare every time.  
  
The thing that she really couldn't believe, nudging away at the back of her mind, was that Rav really, honestly wanted to be with her. That he wanted to have sex with her, sure, maybe. Hot mess and all she was still a pretty good catch. When she'd remembered to shower, and shave, and put on clean underwear.  
  
But Rav knew her better than almost anyone else in the world, except for Len. Knew everything about her, all her weird and crazy, had seen her at her absolute worst a dozen times. There was absolutely no way he could really want her. Not in a real, feelings-y, long term way. Not like he was saying he did.  
  
The thought picked and clawed away at the back of her mind, fermenting in her mind until it was all she could think about. Rav and his awful, dumb, serious feelings, and how she might have them for him, too.  
  
Jessica lasted nearly a week and a half before buckling under the weight of Lennon's silent probing, exploding one evening as they were getting ready to have a girl's night without Joe.  
  
“He knows all of my crazy, Len!”  
  
Lennon, startled into a freeze position in the middle of pouring a glass of wine, stuttered, “What?”  
  
“Rav. He knows all of my crazy already.”  
  
Blinking, trying to catch up with the thread of conversation that had obviously started in Jess' head without her: “That's why you don't want to be with him?”  
  
“Why I can't. I don't think I could ever go out with someone who's seen me have a full-scale emotional breakdown over not being able to put on a shirt! Or who once saw me take a pee in Bobby Makowski's backyard after that halloween party with my legs still taped together like a mermaid!”  
  
A full wine glass was forcibly shoved at her hands and then Lennon was steering her towards a stool in the kitchen.  
  
“Oh my god, Jess, are you kidding me? That's the best thing about it! There is literally no more weirdness you could ever have to ease him into! He knows it all already! Do you know I had to wait three months to have a shower at night when Joe was sleeping over because I didn't want to freak him out with our-”  
  
“-long distance Skype shower time?”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“Well, I don't know why that would have weirded him out. I mean, showers take a good twenty minutes of your time and you have nothing else to do in there. It's just practical.”  
  
“It is practical. Some of the best conversations we had while you were in San Francisco happened in that shower.”  
  
“I know they did! We had some amazing shower conversations.”  
  
“Right! I think we got a little off-topic here. The topic being Rav. And you and Rav.”  
  
Jess groaned and kicked her feet at the island like a toddler.  
  
“No, I take it back. I don't want to talk about it anymore. I don't want to think about it. I just want to sit here and drink more wine and not think about Rav and his dumb feelings.”  
  
Lennon dropped her head downwards and fixed her with her best “Jessicaaaaa” look. Jess chuffed out a laugh despite herself.  
  
“No, Len, I don't want to talk about it anymore right now, okay?”  
  
“Okay, okay. But, Rav is one of your best guys you've ever known, and he likes you so much, and you can't just make that go away by ignoring it. You need to talk to him.”  
  
Jess sighed dramatically and slid off her stool to take her wine to the couch, where the blissful promise of a Designing Women marathon and the end of this conversation awaited. But no amount of wine or tv could stop her from thinking about Rav all night.  
  
(The problem, in truth, was that she really didn't want to stop thinking about him. Or liking him. Or wanting to kiss him. All the time.)

-

  
Whether he was pushed by Lennon or just snapped, it took Rav four days to surprise Jess when she was looking for self-raising flour in the storage room at the bar, lock the door from the inside and put the keys down his pants.  
  
“Rav, what-”  
  
“Go to dinner with me.”  
  
Jess shifted tensely against one of the shelves and dropped her eyes to her hands.  
“I don't want to talk about this.”  
  
“No one's talking about anything. I'm asking you to go out to dinner with me.”  
  
“Which will inevitably lead to the talking, which I don't want to do!”  
  
“Just go on one date with me!”  
  
“Rav, no, we can't do this! We annoy the butts off each other! We fight all the time! We would be the worst couple ever!”  
  
“You can't say that. You don't know that! We could be great!”  
  
“We are literally fighting about whether or not we could be together without fighting!”  
  
“Oh my god, you are the most frustrating- just- let me take you on a date, god dammit!!”  
  
She heard herself fairly growl in frustration.  
  
“FINE!”  
  
(It turned out the way that they argued wasn't such a problem if they were going to make out a lot afterwards.)

-

  
It took four weeks for them to settle into a rhythm, for Jess to stop giggling every time she saw Rav naked (and: “Are you kidding me with this, Jessica? You know, a less secure man would be out of here by now.”), for them both to stop startling every time somebody caught them kissing, as if they shouldn't be doing it in the first place. They fought constantly, but almost never without smiles on their faces. When Jess was working at the bar Rav had to be banned from going into the kitchen, because it tended to end in impromptu make-out sessions that ruined several orders and probably scarred the Filipes for life.  
  
Jess finished her cooking classes with the unexpected offer of a job in a restaurant her teacher part-owned. (“I didn't even know he liked me!” whispered to Lenn on the phone, and “I still kind of feel like he's going to kill me?”)  
  
She told Rav she had to cut down at the bar, because she was going to have a real profession at a proper restaurant that was hiring her on merit alone, not because they were guilt-tripped into it. Rav got so excited he spun her in a circle in the air in the middle of the bar and knocked some old guy's beer off the table. Neither of them could stop giggling for long enough to deliver a sincere apology.  
Rav dragged her into the back room and kissed her till her lips were swollen and her heart was racing against her ribcage, whispered that he was proud of his fancy chef girlfriend.  
  
When they pulled themselves away and went back to the table where Lennon and Joe were waiting, Jess watched him, completely relaxed in his surroundings, a beer in one hand and an arm on the chair behind Len's shoulders. He was blabbering with Joe about some video game or another, Lennon rolling her eyes and interjecting occasionally with logic or to call them dorks. Every so often he looked back to her and caught her eye, his smile getting that little bit brighter, fuller, crinkling around his eyes, before he got drawn back in to the conversation.  
  
-  
  
  
She was starting to think that maybe all this, her divorce, moving back to New York, starting her life over, wasn't supposed to be about her growing up and growing away from the past at all, that maybe this was the life she was supposed to have all along. And when Rav smiled at her, and it felt just as much like home as Lennon did, she thought that maybe this was meant to be it all along, and it'd just taken her this long to circle back to him.  
  
  
  
 _fin_

  
  



End file.
